Did Robert Durst Kill His Wife? An Investigator’s Letter May Shed Light

For more than a year, Robert A. Durst, the embattled real estate scion, has endured a grueling series of pretrial hearings in Los Angeles, where he is charged with murdering a confidante to prevent her from telling the authorities how she helped him cover up the murder of his first wife 36 years ago.

But with those proceedings on hiatus until October, his lawyers are now battling 2,800 miles to the east in State Supreme Court in Mineola, Long Island, to suppress a damaging seven-page letter written in February by an investigator. The letter details how many of Mr. Durst’s statements in 1982 concerning the disappearance of his wife, Kathie McCormack Durst, were “replete with omissions and inaccuracies.”

The investigator, Edward J. Wright, who was working for Mr. Durst’s lawyer in 1982, described how Mr. Durst erupted with “a verbal salvo of expletives directed at me” after he confronted Mr. Durst about the many discrepancies in his account of his whereabouts at the time of Mrs. Durst’s disappearance.

Mr. Wright was promptly terminated, according to the letter.

Mr. Wright sent the letter to the law firm representing Mrs. Durst’s three sisters, who have brought a $100 million lawsuit against Mr. Durst over the disappearance of Mrs. Durst and what they say was her murder.

In a 1,000-page brief filed Thursday, Robert Abrams, a lawyer for the sisters, stated that Mr. Durst hired a well-connected lawyer in 1982 to “conduct a clandestine ‘shadow investigation’ to ensure that the NYPD did not conduct a meaningful investigation into Durst’s involvement in Kathie’s disappearance and murder.” Mr. Durst’s former lawyer, Nicholas Scoppetta, who served as city fire commissioner in the Bloomberg administration, died two years ago.

Mr. Abrams is seeking to use the letter in the lawsuit and to obtain Mr. Wright’s testimony.

“This case proves that someone like Durst, with hundreds of millions of dollars, may be able to avoid justice for 36 years,” Mr. Abrams said Thursday. “But in the 37th year, Durst and the people who helped him will be brought to justice.”

Mr. Durst’s attorney in the case, Joshua A. Siegel, has asked the judge for an injunction prohibiting release of Mr. Wright’s letter, saying it is “indisputably protected from disclosure by the attorney-client privilege,” which can be waived only by Mr. Durst, not Mr. Wright. Mr. Wright’s own lawyers also oppose its release.

At the time he worked for Mr. Scoppetta, Mr. Wright was a retired city police detective employed by the state Division of Criminal Justice Services. He may have broken regulations by moonlighting as a private eye. The lawsuit argues that Mr. Wright and Mr. Scoppetta used their connections to obtain confidential information from the police department to protect Mr. Durst, as well as his father, Seymour Durst, and the Durst Organization, the real estate company Seymour Durst ran.

Mr. Abrams argues that Mr. Durst’s lawyers failed to establish that there was an attorney-client relationship between Mr. Durst and Mr. Scoppetta and Mr. Wright. And if there was, Mr. Abrams said, Mr. Durst had waived the privilege in numerous ways, including his 20 hours of interviews with the producers of the 2015 HBO documentary “The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst.”

The final episode of “The Jinx” famously concludes with Mr. Durst muttering off-camera: “What the hell did I do? Killed them all, of course.”

Mr. Durst, who at 75 is frail and worth $100 million, sits in Los Angeles County jail caught in a bicoastal legal pincer. He has been estranged from his family for a quarter-century.

His nine-year marriage to Kathie Durst had descended into violence in 1982 when she abruptly vanished, only five months short of fulfilling a lifelong dream of becoming a doctor. Her family and friends immediately suspected Mr. Durst, but an investigation ended without any charges against him.

Prompted in part by “The Jinx,” the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s office charged Mr. Durst in 2015 with the murder of his confidante, Susan Berman in 2000, saying he killed her to prevent her from revealing to investigators who had reopened the case that she helped him cover up Kathie Durst’s murder.

Mr. Durst continues to say that he did not kill either his first wife or Ms. Berman. He has never been charged with murdering Kathie Durst, despite two separate investigations. There is neither a body nor an official crime scene.

But the 1982 reports by Mr. Wright and his recent letter cast a long shadow over Mr. Durst’s veracity.

In the letter Mr. Wright states that he was “retained to conduct an inquiry to determine both the accuracy and validity of statements made by Mr. Durst to Mr. Scoppetta with the ultimate goal of locating the whereabouts of Kathleen Durst.”

After interviewing various witnesses and checking Mr. Durst’s statements, Mr. Wright said, he challenged Mr. Durst to explain certain inconsistencies. Mr. Durst, he said, went into a “tirade, outraged that I was wasting my time checking on him.”

Mr. Wright’s letter mirrors what he said in a 2015 interview and in a progress report he wrote about the case in 1982.

“Initially, they all believed Robert, that Kathie mysteriously disappeared,” Mr. Wright said in the 2015 interview. “Robert was a wonderful liar. He’d look you straight in the face and tell you a wonderful story.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A20 of the New York edition with the headline: Durst Asks Judge to Keep Incriminating Letter Secret. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe